Customers Might Hate Your Website, Here’s Why

Your business website is not perfect. No matter how much you love it and think it represents your brand, there are people out there who hate it. It could be difficult to navigate. It could have annoying features. Or it could be something really trivial that just rubs users the wrong way. But whatever the reason, your goal should be to have your website bother as few people as possible.

While you certainly can’t please everyone, there are a few pretty common things that can annoy or anger online customers. Avoiding these pitfalls can go a long way toward getting more customers to actually like and appreciate your website. They could be simple issues that you have just overlooked.

Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Acquia, recently outlined some of these common issues in a post on Mashable. One of the issues he mentions is slow load times. If a website takes more than a few seconds to load, many customers get annoyed and some even leave the site altogether. In the post Wentworth explained:

“You’ve heard it a hundred times before: we’re living in a society of instant gratification. So when users click on a link, they want it to load — fast. In fact, 40 percent of visitors will leave your website if it takes longer than three seconds to load, which can have a huge impact on your bottom line sales goals.”

So while you might be more concerned with adding all of the bells and whistles to attract new customers to your site, you could actually be driving them away. Of course you don’t want to keep your site completely plain. Customers definitely tend to appreciate cool visual and multimedia elements. But you do need to keep load time in mind when you add things to your site, or you could be losing major business.

Wentworth also mentioned six other common pitfalls in the post. Those include: having too much text, having websites that don’t work on phones and tablets, including annoying pop-ups, autoplay videos, a bad shopping experience, or having no way to contact customer service.

I am a professional web programmer and designer who specializes in building beautiful internet sites and applications that function transparently. I have been working in the field for over 15 years, and am currently serving clients in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City.